


That Nameless Agony

by Becky_Blue_Eyes



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Assassination, Background Relationships, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Justice for Elia Martell, Loreza Martell Is Not A Happy Woman, Murder, Murder-Suicide, Revenge, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:14:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28056714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Becky_Blue_Eyes/pseuds/Becky_Blue_Eyes
Summary: There’s a name for a child who loses their parent, and a spouse who loses their partner. But what about the poor soul who loses their sibling? Their child? Their grandchild? What word is there for that nameless agony that takes all the lights of the past, present and future, and snuffs them out?Loreza Martell, Princess of Dorne, has no name for the incandescent void rupturing unholy grief in her heart. No name other than death.A sad little story where the victors of Robert’s Rebellion learn the hard way that no amount of appeasement and groveling will stop a wrathful sister, grieving mother, patient grandmother. Violence and major character deaths all around.
Comments: 31
Kudos: 91
Collections: Southern Renaissance (Dorne Renaissance)





	That Nameless Agony

At least Elia got to hope, in the very last moment of her life, that no one would find little Rhaenys. Because she saw what they did to Aegon, just an infant at her breast. She became a mother without a child, something so wretched it bears no name, and all the life in her eyes stamped out save for that glimmer of hope that somehow Rhaenys made it.

Rhaenys does not make it. It is best that Elia did not know this, it is a mercy.

But Elia’s mother knows. And when Loreza Martell is denied the bones of her brother, of her daughter, of her granddaughter and grandson—the walls of Sunspear shake with the fury of her sorrow.

* * *

Dorne does not declare war. 10,000 Dornish spears went to their death at the Trident and their blood still soaks heavy in the earth, why would Loreza declare any more war? But she does not let this lie. No, she does not forgive nor forget, and she knows it shall begin with the whore and her brother in the Red Mountains.

It is no coincidence that the Tower of Joy is closest to Starfall. The Daynes, Loreza’s own cousins through her uncle’s marriage, they are traitors. Arthur Dayne is a venomous snake with a lamb’s face and doubly so for Ashara, the girl who Loreza hand picked for Elia’s household! They knew where Lyanna Stark was all along and said nothing! Did nothing! And now Elia and Lewyn and Rhaenys and Aegon are dead!

Dead! They are dead and Loreza is denied their very bones!

Loreza weeps until she wonders whether tears of salt or tears of blood drip down her chin. Oberyn, just barely arrived from Essos too late to save Elia and her children, burns to avenge his sister and niece and nephew and uncle. He is not an orphan nor a widow, and yet he too has lost so many precious ties to his heart. They all have, her dear Doran tears himself to pieces inside to hold in his grief and Oberyn claws at his chest until vicious red lines streak down and reveal the burning empty aglow in their hearts. Her children burn and Loreza burns with them. “We shall avenge them,” she whispers. Hr voice is harsh like wind howling over those cursed Red Mountains. “They will not get away with this. I will not rest until we have justice.”

“Justice,” Doran chokes out. Oh, her darling boy, her darling gentle-hearted boy, there is such hatred in his eyes. “How can we have justice when their murderers sit on the Iron Throne?”

“They are not dragons.” Loreza cradles her two sons to her chest. Two sons out of five children she bore. Only two! What horror, what unimaginable heartbreak! For the first time she is glad her beloved Qorin is dead, because he would not have survived this. She tilts her head back and bids the bile burning in her throat to recede. “We did not bow, nor bend, nor break, for dragons. And who are they? Who are they to do this to us?”

Baratheons, Lannisters, Starks, even Daynes. Let it begin from the list up, let Loreza take what burns and bleeds in her chest and manifest it into those who dared to take her family away from her.

The spear and sun of Dorne, without a hint of mercy. Where was the mercy offered to Loreza’s only daughter, to Loreza’s only brother, to the two grandchildren Loreza shall never watch grow up? What mercy then?

What mercy now?

None!

There is no name for the grief in Loreza’s heart, only death!

* * *

Loreza dismounts from her horse to the bodies hogtied before the blighted tower. The Starks still live, as does Ashara Dayne, but all the rest seem to have killed themselves over Lyanna and the mewling little bastard at her breast. Pity that. Loreza would’ve liked to sink her dagger into their eyes and carve out their excuses for not being there to save their brother, her brother! Her only brother!

“All this bloodshed,” she hisses, “for the sake of a whoreson.”

Lyanna is dying already, bleeding to death from an ill-begotten birth. She still has spite in her, spite enough to say that she is no whore and her son no bastard. Oberyn vibrates with vicious intent. Let him release it. Let them suffer! Who are the Starks to this land of burning sands? Where are their righteous banners now, still wrapped in the bleeding corpses of babes?

They say Aegon’s head was smashed in against a wall, that Rhaenys was stabbed half a hundred times, that Elia was raped to death. Loreza’s voice raises higher and higher until it is a wordless scream. The bastard screams and Lyanna screams and Ned Stark dares to scream for mercy. Mercy! Mercy here in these burning red sands already soaked through with blood and gore like the sodden Trident, like the marble floor of Kings Landing, like the endless void of eternity that bleeds before Loreza’s eyes!

All her past, present and future have been stolen from her! All that remains is blood! Blood and death!

And so Loreza gives blood and death to them.

Oberyn spears Ned and his bannerman through the heart, quick and quiet. Lyanna herself bleeds to death screaming for her brother before Loreza so much as touches her. Loreza slits Ashara’s throat to silence her traitor excuses. And the babe, the poor little bastard born into so much grief and despair…Loreza holds him to her breast, rocks and shushes him, and holds him tight. He quiets down to sleep and she holds his face to her breast tighter. Tighter. Until he is quiet, until everything beneath the grim white sun is still and quiet.

“Mother,” Oberyn breathes. “The boy…he—”

“It is better this way,” Loreza whispers. “Better he never know what life he was to have, better no one know he was ever born.”

The bodies burn beneath the tower and are collected to be scattered in the sea. The tower itself is left to the herdsmen who roam the deserts, to be pulled down at their pleasure because they too have a nameless grief for their princess gone and lost.

No one shall know what became of Lyanna Stark, nor her brother, nor the Kingsguard and all the poor fools riding beneath Stark banners. As far as the world knows they must have drowned somewhere in Shipbreaker Bay.

When the fool king demands answers, when he sends his lackey Hand to see if Loreza has any hint of guilt—Loreza stares at him, and the Hand recoils at the wild grief that sears her to the bone.

Does he know he is next?

* * *

The nights are very long now.

They say that the stars above Sunspear are a treasure to behold, that you can see Nymeria and all her ten thousand ships sailing across the night.

Loreza sees none of it.

She sees the dark and she sees her daughter’s eyes, her brother’s eyes, her grandchildren’s eyes. And there are no stars to bring her light from those eyes, as they are closed forever.

She weeps, and weeps, and even when her tears dry up and her voice crackles away all she has left is weeping before that endless dark.

* * *

Lord Hand Jon Arryn overstays his welcome. Loreza sits on her throne with Arianne on her knee, her arms wrapped securely around this little bit of light. He tries to appease her, offering her the heads of the Mountain and the Pig, the return of Lewyn’s bones. But his alone, as Elia’s and her children’s are beneath the Sept of Baelor. With full honors, he claims.

“Where was the honor in how they died, my lord?” What honor does a falcon have, or a stag or lion? What do they know of honor when they stepped over the corpses of a twenty-five-year-old woman and her two children younger than three, all to sit on the world’s ugliest chair? There is honor in grief either, as it leaves Loreza stripped to her innards and left bare all her pain to the world. There is no honor to be found here and he should not pretend. She tells him so and he will not meet her gaze.

“I too have lost children before, Your Highness,” he dares to say. “I understand your grief, and I understand that you are angry.”

“It’s true that you have lost children before.” Loreza presses a kiss to Arianne’s forehead before letting her down from her lap. She runs off to play with her favorite cousin Tyene. Lewyn and his paramour Lemore had three daughters, Obara, Nymeria and Tyene. They are in Arianne’s household now; they shall enjoy the Water Gardens soon enough while Loreza comforts her would-be good sister. To be a widow with more than half your life hanging before you like a ladder over a dark precipice, to look into your children’s eyes and see how fragile their lives are… “And it is true that you’ve lost wives as well. Tell me, my lord, did your wives ever outlive their children?”

“No, Your Highness.”

“Then I am glad for them. You see, my husband Qorin was there to hold me when we lost two of our children in the cradle. Just little babes they were. And he died some years past believing our surviving three children would grow to be old and gray, and that our grandchildren shall survive us all.” Loreza is quiet. Until now her voice has been calm and steady if worn to the quick. Then her voice is gravel shifting over a funeral shroud. “I loved my husband. I love him still. And I am so thankful every day that he died before he could see what became of our daughter, of our grandchildren. I would never wish such a terrible grief onto someone I loved, not to even a stranger.”

Jon is quiet as well for a moment. “And to an enemy?”

Loreza smiles. “You must already know of some of this pain, my lord.” Golden Tywin Lannister and dear King Robert Baratheon have yet to.

* * *

Yes, Jon has stayed far too long, and Oberyn is perhaps the cleverest of her children.

A poison that takes a year to do its work, years of cold sweats and infertility and teeth rotting out of one’s head molar by crackled molar. By the time Jon realizes he is sick, it shall be far too late, and no one will know what has become of him save for Loreza cradling Elia’s wedding dress to her face and willing herself to please, please stop crying.

* * *

Every child born from Queen Cersei and Lady Selyse’s womb is a malformed wretch already dead. The smallfolk blame the king’s crimes in the Rebellion for his foul fate, and the smallfolk are treated harshly in the Crownlands. Especially those of dark hair and dark eye, but they are idiots. After all, the color of one’s skin does not inherently define their allegiance—sweet secret Lemore has bright blue eyes and blonde hair, while dreadfully departed Ashara had olive skin and black hair. And who is scattered forgotten in the Narrow Sea, and who has sewn the seeds to the Baratheon’s destruction?

Jon came through with his promise before his death, and the skulls of the Mountain and Pig mount above Loreza’s solar. Sometimes she douses them in alcohol and sets them on fire, to give their souls an extra taste of hell flame as they rot in the deepest of hells. She does not tell her sons this so they do not worry, but sometimes she holds her hands close to the flames so she can feel the burn instead of her constant weary fatigue.

Loreza is old, not as old as Olenna Tyrell but age has bowed her spine and made shaky her hands. But with her withered hands she raises a fleet. First three ships, then ten, then forty, then a hundred. Ships to sail to the Free Cities and the Summer Islands and beyond in search of wealth that Westeros shall not give to their malcontented southern kingdom. Dorne may never be as rich as the Westerlands but Loreza shall see her granddaughters’ land blossom with trade and new glasshouses. She will do all she can for those that remain.

The only other option left to her is to scream into her pillow until unconsciousness sweeps her away from the agony that is being alive. Loreza lives! She lives and how can she?! How can she live?!

While her parents are dead!

While her husband is dead!

While her brother is dead!

While her children are dead!

While her grandchildren are dead!

Doran lies his head on her lap and looks up at her with his father’s eyes. “Mama,” he murmurs, “you must rest. Time shall heal our wounds.”

“There is no healing these wounds, my son.” She bends down to kiss his forehead as if he is a boy of three again. Rhaenys shall ever be three in Loreza’s heart, and sometimes when she sees Oberyn laugh with Ellaria Sand and Doran bounce Arianne in his arms, she sees the sons of her youth again. Back when all was golden and bright, and Elia was leaning against Loreza’s side with all the sunlight caught in her hair. The sun still shines now, on her sons. Not on Loreza. But that is alright. “All I care for now is to see you and Mellario reconciled. There is no need to foster Quentyn away, we must stay together now that—that we are so little now.” Doran shudders and Loreza squeezes her eyes shut. She must not weep before her son. She must never. “Betroth the Yronwood heir to Arianne and make him the next Prince of Dorne, or perhaps marry their girl to Quentyn and have him take their name as penance. Whatever you must do, but do not lock yourself away from your wife.”

Doran sighs; such a heavy sigh, such a heavy soul they all have now. “I love her still, but I do not wish her to see me like this. But she doesn’t understand, and we always fight over nothing that truly matters, and…”

“I understand you wish to spare Mellario your grief. But do not create new grief where there ought to be only love. Go to her, and remind her that you shall be hers for all the time left to you.” Qorin promised her a hundred years and could only give her thirty. Rhaegar, may he rot forever in the seven hells, promised Elia eternal love and abandoned her to die for the sake of a girl-woman. Loreza does not tell Doran to make promises he could not keep.

Leave that to their enemies, who shall find Loreza’s promises quite unbreakable.

* * *

Loreza prays that Aegon did not suffer. She knows Elia did for certain, as did Lewyn, and that Rhaenys must have been so terrified in her last moments. But Aegon was just a baby, with only thoughts of milk and warm arms in his little malleable head. She prays until her knees bruise that at least one of them did not have to suffer.

* * *

She saves Robert Baratheon and Tywin Lannister for last.

It was the Mountain and the Pig who killed her daughter and grandchildren. Lannister men doing Lannister business to get a Lannister on the throne just as that miserable bastard always wanted. For that, he goes last, right after his king.

Renly Baratheon dies when he is tripped down the narrow dripping stairs of Storm’s End. His brother Stannis dies of greyscale that Lemore planted in his bedsheets. Jaime, Tywin’s golden boy, and his dwarf brother are overwhelmed by a Faceless Man pretending to be a crofter’s orphan daughter. Oh, that cost Loreza much, perhaps too much, but there could be no question that Tywin needed to lose his children. Gold can always be earned back; blood is not so easily regenerated. Cersei did the hard work for Loreza and threw herself from the Tower of the Hand when word spread of her brothers’ demise. Throughout it all, no one ever expected dear Lemore, for all they accused everyone with dark hair of being the culprit.

That just leaves the fool Robert, who smiled when Rhaenys and Aegon were presented to him, who called Elia naught but a Dornish whore. Loreza herself goes to Kings Landing to attend the queen’s funeral. She does not expect to return and tells her children so.

Oberyn weeps and clings to her skirts. He begs her not to go, not to make orphans of him and Doran. Doran is overcome with pain, mute and blind and deaf. But Loreza has known for years that this must be the end of it. Let the cycle end now, let all the pain end now, let the burning grief nestled deep in her chest finally snuff itself out and cease.

“Be brave,” she says into her sons’ hair. “Be brave, be kind, and protect those you love.” Mellario and Ellaria shall comfort her boys when Loreza cannot. Lemore has returned to the Water Gardens to raise her daughters and give Arianne and Sarella cheer. Dorne grows richer by the day, the blood orange trees are heavy with fruit, and the sun swelters above them as it always does.

All is in good hands. All is settled save for that wretched nameless agony.

She ponders that agony on her way to meet her fate. How many loved ones has she lost north of Dorne? Her brother, her daughter, her grandchildren, and her friends. If Joanna could see her husband now, would she weep? Did Rhaella choose to let go during her final pregnancy to finally achieve rest? There is no name for losing a friend and it is grief compounded atop grief. To think that when they were girls, they wished to marry their children together and see them grow, see their grandchildren grow…Loreza was the first, and now here she is at the last.

She tightens her fists around the gem-inlaid dagger until her entire body shakes with wrath, with sorrow, with wild pain. Pain! Loreza has only known pain for all these terrible years! What else is left to the world other than pain?

Lewyn, when they were young enough that Loreza could rest her elbow on his shoulder and he still had a gap between his milk teeth, once told her that he would protect her forever. Even when he was called to be a Kingsguard in the aftermath of Maelys the Monstrous, even when he was so far away that even raves took weeks—even then, Lewy protected his Reza. She prays to him to protect her now, to protect them all from the encroaching dark.

First Robert, then Tywin, then finally the end of this cycle.

* * *

It’s remarkable how much they underestimate an old woman bowed and broken down by grief. It’s as if she stop existing after her courses ended and her breasts sagged to her navel. She walks into Robert’s bedroom, where he is in a drunken haze after the funeral and still covered in the sweat of his whores. The whores are not here; good, Loreza does not wish to do more than she must.

Instead she straddles him like mounting a stodgy horse, slaps away his clumsy hands, and buries her knife in his eye. She thrusts her free hand down on his mouth and muffles his screams. And she stabs, and stabs, and stabs. Her dagger is drenched with a paralyzing poison, so soon enough he can no more scream so much as gurgle and hiss.

They say that the Mountain gouged Elia’s eyes out with his thumbs while he raped her to death. Loreza lacks the necessary parts and depravity to do the same to Robert, but a knife is as good as any thumb. For good measure she cuts his throat to the bone and further, until her knife embeds in the mattress and she can raise his head above hers as her trophy. Her gory, oozing trophy dripping brain and bone.

She puts it and the dagger in her cloak and leaves the bedroom as casually as she entered it. Up the endless flight of stairs in the Tower of the Hand, each step creaking in Loreza’s joints.

Robert is dead and his head is in her cloak. He is dead! As the rest of his blasted house, as the rest of those who ruined Loreza’s life save one! Just one left! Tears burn down her cheeks and Loreza’s brow furrows into a thousand valleys of pain and grief. She bites her lips so that Tywin doesn’t heart her coming but it bubbles out, years and years of dark agony spill from her shaking mouth and echo like blood splatters down the tower.

Tywin opens his door in a rush just as Loreza arrives with a dagger in his hand. Loreza throws Robert’s head at his face and the shock knocks Tywin down.

He looks up at her with wide green eyes, green like poison, and dares—he dares to ask, “Why?”

Why?

Why?!

Loreza screams.

Her vision goes red and black, and she brings her fists down first with her dagger, then with his, then bare and bloodied. Down, down, she bears down and she shrieks her wrath. Her brother! Her daughter! Her grandchildren! Loreza has lost everything at the hands of Tywin, and she has pain back her debt seven-fold! His children! His power! His legacy! His life!

“What is the name of a sister who loses her brother?! A mother who loses her daughter?! A grandmother her grandchildren?!” she demands of him. His mouth yaws open with all his teeth smashed in, like Aegon’s head smashed against a wall. His chest yaws open with all his ribs cut free, like Rhaenys stabbed half a hundred times. His throat yaws open with all his spine carved out, like Lewyn bleeding out on the Trident. All the while Loreza screams, like Elia screaming in the last moments of her life. “There is none! No name at all! No name other than DIE!!”

And die he does.

Tywin is dead.

Loreza tilts her head back and wails, wails until her tears wash her face clean of blood.

When the guards finally make their way up to the tower’s apartments, Loreza smiles at them. She turns the dagger upon her heart, and shouts for all Kings Landing to hear, “Such is the name of death! And even death must die!”

And die she does.

* * *

The night is long and endless, stretching out for eternity.

Then pricks of light break through the darkness, one and another until all the stars that have ever shone drench their light upon her.

Then hands, small and large, grab her and pull her into the light,

and Loreza hugs her parents, husband, brother, daughter, sons, grandchildren close,

and she is bothered by that nameless agony no longer—

**Author's Note:**

> There is a prevailing theory in the fandom that House Martell shall be destroyed by seeking destructive vengeance. But I’m gonna be blunt here—aside from Oberyn using Tyrion’s trial by combat to seek justice for Elia and her children and Obara wanting vengeance for Oberyn’s death, *what destructive vengeance?* Where are the assassins? Poisonings? Someone snapping like a wire under too much strain and lashing out to murder everyone in their way? If anything, Doran is a freaking saint because I too am an older sibling separated by many years. And if any of my baby siblings were to be murdered with my nieces/nephews and there was no justice for them? Catch me on CNN going batshit feral on whoever hurt them.
> 
> Therefore, in the spirit of going feral, let’s let Mama Martell have her vengeance.
> 
> Note: in this story, Obara, Nymeria and Tyene are the children of Prince Lewyn and Septa Lemore. I did the math and Oberyn was only 13 when Obara was born and very underage for Nymeria and Tyene, so I was squicked out and reallocated them lol


End file.
